Are Your Windows Clean? Part2

Last month we talked about cleaning up your PC from the inside. The first step is getting rid of the dreaded temp files. Once you’ve deleted them all, make sure to get rid of them for good, by emptying the Recycle Bin. Until you do this you have just been moving garbage around. This will be your trash day pickup.

The next useful tool to use is the Disk Defragmenter that comes as part of Windows. As files are added and deleted they are written to the next available spaced on the drive. This is not always right next to the rest of the information in the group. This means that the hard drive has to access many different sections of the hard drive to get you the information you want. Fragmentation will make the computer run slower than you want. This is where defragmenter comes in, like a caped superhero through an open window. Defragmenter rewrites the drive to put related information closer together. Remember that this may take some time to run depending on the amount of fragmentation, the size of the drive and the speed of the computer. My best advice is to run this overnight, because it tends to slow the machine to a crawl while it is running.

Another useful tool is Checkdisk. Checkdisk will examine the integrity of the file system on your hard drive. Often, running this tool will speed things up or even clear up odd problems you were not able to pinpoint. You will want to wait until you have some spare time to run Checkdisk. Error Checking requires full access to some Windows files, so it will not run until the next time you reboot. After choosing Check Now make sure to check both options, so that the tool may fix any errors it finds.

To get to both tools go into My Computer and choose the drive you want to run the tools on. Right click on C:, for instance, and choose Properties. Go to the second tab labeled Tools. The tools mentioned above are listed as Error Checking and Defragmentation. Choose Check Now or Defragment Now.


Until next month…….Safe Computing!

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